“Are you all right?”
Startled at the voice so close to him, he looked up and saw Madeleine at the den door.
“Jesus, how the hell…?”
“You were so engrossed in your conversation you didn’t hear me come in.”
“Apparently not.” Blinking, he looked at his watch. “So where did you go?”
“Remember what I said on my way out?”
“You said you wouldn’t tell me where you were going.”
“I said I’d already told you twice.”
“Okay, fine. Well, I have work to do.”
As if it were his ally, the phone rang.
The call was from Sotherton, but it wasn’t from Richard Kartch. It was from a detective by the name of Gowacki.
“We got a situation,” he said. “How soon do you think you can get here?”
Chapter 39
By the time Gurney got off the phone with the flat-voiced Mike Gowacki, it was nine-fifteen. He found Madeleine already in bed, propped against her pillows, with a book. War and Peace. She’d been reading it for three years, shuttling back and forth between it and, incongruously, Thoreau’s Walden.
“I have to head out to a crime scene.”
She looked up at him from the book-curious, worried, lonely.
He felt able to respond only to the curiosity. “Another male victim. Stabbed in the throat, footprints in the snow.”
“How far?”
“What?”
“How far do you have to go?”
“Sotherton, Massachusetts. Three, four hours, maybe.”
“So you won’t be back until sometime tomorrow.”
“For breakfast, I hope.”
She smiled her who-do-you-think-you’re-kidding? smile.
He started to leave, then stopped and sat on the edge of the bed. “This is a strange case,” he said, letting his unsureness about it come through. “Getting stranger by the day.”
She nodded, somehow placated. “You don’t think it’s your standard serial killer?”
“Not the standard version, no.”
“Too much communication with the victims?”
“Yes. And too much diversity among the victims-personally and geographically. Typical serial killer doesn’t bounce around from the Catskills to the East Bronx to the middle of Massachusetts pursuing famous authors, retired night watchmen, and nasty loners.”
“They must have something in common.”
“They all have drinking histories, and the evidence indicates the killer is focused on that issue. But they must have something else in common-otherwise why go to the trouble of choosing victims two hundred miles apart from one another?”
They fell silent. Gurney absently smoothed wrinkles out of the quilt in the space between them. Madeleine watched him for a while, her hands resting on her book.
“I better get going,” he said.
“Be careful.”
“Right.” He rose slowly, almost arthritically. “See you in the morning.”
She looked at him with an expression he could never put into words, couldn’t even say if it was good or bad, but he knew it well. He felt its almost physical touch in the center of his chest.
It was well after midnight when he exited from the Mass. Turnpike and one-thirty when he drove through the deserted main street of Sotherton. Ten minutes later, on the rutted lane called Quarry Road, he arrived at a haphazard assembly of police vehicles, one of which had its strobes flashing. He pulled in alongside it. As he got out of his car, an irritated-looking uniformed cop emerged from the light machine.
“Hold it. Where do you think you’re going?” He sounded not only irritated but exhausted.
“Name is Gurney-here to see Detective Gowacki.”
“About what?”
“He’s expecting me.”
“What’s it about?”
Gurney wondered whether the guy’s edge was coming from a long day or from a naturally lousy attitude. He had a low tolerance for naturally lousy attitudes.
“It’s about him asking me to come here. You want some identification?”
The cop clicked his flashlight on and shined it in Gurney’s face. “Who’d you say you were?”
“Gurney, district attorney’s office, special investigator.”
“The fuck didn’t you say so?”
Gurney smiled without any emotion resembling friendliness. “You going to tell Gowacki I’m here?”
After a final hostile pause, the man turned and walked up the outer edge of a long, rising driveway toward a house that seemed, in the portable arc lights illuminating the property for the crime-scene techs, only half finished. Uninvited, Gurney followed him.
As the driveway neared the house, it made a left cut into the bank of the hill and arrived at the opening to a two-car basement garage, currently housing one car. At first Gurney thought the garage doors were open; then he realized there weren’t any doors. The half inch of snow that coated the driveway continued inside. The cop stopped at the opening, blocked by crime-scene tape, and shouted, “Mike!”
There was no response. The cop shrugged as if an honest effort had been made, had failed, and that was the end of the matter. Then a tired voice came from the yard behind the house. “Back here.”
Without waiting, Gurney headed around the perimeter of the tape in that direction.
“Make sure you stay outside the tape.” The cop’s warning struck Gurney as the final bark of a testy dog.
Rounding the rear corner of the house, he saw that the area, bright as day in the glare of the lights, was not exactly the “yard” he had expected. Like the house, it exhibited an odd blend of incompletion and decrepitude. A heavily built man with thinning hair was standing on a crude set of steps, cobbled together from two-by-tens, at the back door. The man’s eyes scanned the half acre of open ground that separated the house from a thicket of sumac.
The ground was lumpy, as though it had never been graded after the foundation was backfilled. Scraps of framing lumber, heaped here and there, had taken on a weathered grayness. The house was only partially sided, and the plastic moisture barrier over the plywood sheathing was faded from exposure. The impression was not of construction in progress but construction abandoned.
When the stout man’s gaze reached Gurney, he studied him for a few seconds before asking, “You the man from the Catskills?”
“That’s right.”
“Walk another ten feet along the tape, then step under it and come around here to the back door. Make sure you steer clear of that line of footprints from the house to the driveway.”
Presumably this was Gowacki, but Gurney had an aversion to presuming, so he asked the question and got back an affirmative grunt.
As he made his way across the wasteland that should have been a backyard, he came close enough to the footprints to note their similarity to those at the institute.
“Look familiar?” asked Gowacki, eyeing Gurney curiously.
There was nothing thick about the thick-bodied detective’s perception, thought Gurney. He nodded. Now it was his own turn to be perceptive.
“Those footprints bother you?”
“Little bit,” said Gowacki. “Not the footprints, exactly. More the location of the body in relation to the footprints. You know something I don’t?”
“Would the location of the body make more sense if the direction of the footprints were reversed?”
“If the direction were… Wait a minute… Yes, goddamn it, perfect sense!” He stared at Gurney. “What the hell are we dealing with here?”
“First of all, we’re dealing with someone who has killed three people-three that we know of-in the past week. He’s a planner and a perfectionist. He leaves a lot of evidence behind, but only evidence he wants us to see. He’s extremely intelligent, probably well educated, and may hate the police even more than he hates his victims. By the way, is the body still here?”
Gowacki looked like he was making a mental recording of Gurney’s response. Finally he said, “Yeah, the body’s here. I wanted you to see it. Thought something might register, based on what you know about the other two. Ready to take a look?”